It all started with an article in the local paper asking for volunteers for a Hands Around The World project to install electricity in a remote clinic in Zambia, in 1994. A year later I was back, having persuaded my husband Paul to come with me. Taking a 12 month sabbatical from my general practice in Gloucester, I faced the challenges of tropical medicine and Paediatrics as a medical officer at St, Francis’ Hospital, Kaete, a 350-bed mission hospital serving a large rural area in the Eastern province in Zambia.
We are now nearing the end of our time here and as well as the medical experience, we have gained an insight into the lives of local people. Life here is hard. In the dry season, women get up at 4am to fetch water from the well and carry it home (on their heads). Schoolchildren walk 5km to school without shoes.
Patients walk, cycle, or hitch great distances in dilapidated pick-ups to get to the hospital, often with advanced diseases or injuries several days old. Malaria, malnutrition, T.B. and AIDS took a heavy toll of young lives.
I look after Mbusa Wabwino (The Good Shepherd), the children’s ward. In March, the peak season for malaria and malnutrition, at the end of the rains and before the maize harvest, there were nearly a hundred under-five-year-olds on the ward. They were 2 to a cot. In Out-Patient I see patients with snake bites and bilharzia, unconscious babies having fits, children with fractures from falling out of mango trees, many sick people needing admission- very different from the coughs and colds of UK general practice. Supplies of basic drugs run out and the x-ray machine was not working for four months.
One day a week I go out into the bush in a four-wheel drive vehicle with a team from the hospital to see patients at rural health centres. St Luke’s, Msoro (where our Hands Around The World group installed electricity in 1994) is one of the RHC’s we visit every six weeks. It has been good to go back there and see old friends, and the lights and electrical equipment working well… The oxygen concentrator is at last on order and expected to arrive soon… It will deliver oxygen to up to four children with severe pneumonia and can be life-saving.
The year at St. Francis Hospital has been challenging but rewarding. We have learnt to look at the world from new perspectives and shared with people whose lives are materially poor but who are generous in offering their acceptance, friendship and joy.